With years of digital exhaust now behind us – over 240 billion photos on Facebook, 8 billion on Flickr, and not to mention the 72 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every month – we’re now transitioning to a time when we’re in need of smarter tools for organizing and accessing our personal data archives. Only a few companies so far have dared to step into this space because of the technical… → Read More
+1 more for East London’s Tech City cluster: big data company Cloudera has announced the opening of its EMEA HQ on Rivington Street, Shoreditch. In late 2010, the U.K. coalition government created the Tech City label to slap on an existing, organic startup hub — promising equity finance for businesses with high growth potential and money for tech & innovation centres. → Read More
No one wants to read thousands of reviews. You just want answers. Luckily there’s TipSense, a new startup whose algorithm sorts big messy data sets. TipSense’s site DishTip tells you what to order at restaurants, for example, while its AppCrawlr deduces an app’s best and worst features and lays them out with competitors on a comparison chart. TipSense is so smart I bet it gets acquired. → Read More
If knowledge is a door to information, data is the key. When you’re talking about politics and government, information is extremely important to those who are making decisions on who to vote for and what legislation to get behind or block. Today, a company called ElectNext has raised a seed round of $1.3M led by Brooklyn Bridge Ventures along with other strategic investors like Liberty City… → Read More
Marketwire, a company best known for its newswire and press release distribution, is today upping its game in another part of its business, the currently-hot areas of social analytics and big data. From today, it is rebranding as Marketwired, and it is naming a new EVP for product and technology — big-data specialist Stu Ogawa, who’s been poached from Yahoo – to help put its new focus into… → Read More
This new book, Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work and Think - written by Oxford University professor Viktor Mayer-Schonberger and The Economist journalist Ken Cukier – is the definitive guide to a new age which, both authors promise, is going to revolutionize the way we live, work and think. → Read More
Fivetran, a new Y Combinator-backed startup that is launching today, wants to bring spreadsheets into the modern age and make it easier for users to work with messy data and analyze large amounts of information. Most people, for better or worse, use their spreadsheets as databases, and Fivetran acknowledges this by combining SQL-like queries with standard spreadsheet functions and statistical… → Read More
Sometimes it takes a bit more time to get something right — especially when it’s technically challenging.
That’s why Amiato, a Palo Alto, California-based startup, labeled itself as one of the “off the record” Demo Day companies when it graduated last spring from the Winter 2012 class of Y Combinator. But today Amiato, which was previously known as Nou Data, is coming out of the shadows with… → Read More
Looker Data Sciences, a business intelligence startup founded by an early lead engineer from Netscape and LiveOps, is today emerging from stealth mode and announcing $2 million in funding from First Round Capital and PivotNorth to build out its business based on a new, easier-to-use approach to SQL called LookML — what it describes as a “sequel to SQL.” → Read More
Think Big Analytics has raised $3 million from angel investors for what it calls its “big data as a service,” which combines data science and data engineering for customers invested in building out infrastructures to get more from their data and build predictive models to make decisions. Daniel Scheinman led the investment with participation from WI Harper Group. → Read More
In 2012, the buzz around education technology reached new heights and, with the new year now underway, the hype surrounding the potential transformative impact of technology on both higher and K-12 education continues, thanks to initiatives like the one Udacity is piloting with largest university system in the world, which aims to bring affordable, lower-division and remedial online courses to the… → Read More
Editor’s note: Chris Luo is VP of Marketing at FiveStars. Previously, he ran small business marketing at Facebook and acquisition marketing in Asia-Pacific for Google AdWords.
Over the past few years, most of us who work at mid to large-sized companies have seen our productivity multiply by the successful integration of big data and SaaS. But small businesses have not reaped the same benefits. → Read More
Recently, I had the Founder and Chief Scientist of Cloudera, Jeff Hammerbacher, over to the studio to talk about his experience building out big data systems for Facebook. He explained to me how the lack of commercially available data storage and analysis inspired him to start Cloudera. → Read More
Founded in 2008 after more than a decade of research at Stanford, Silicon Valley-based startup, Ayasdi, is on a mission to reinvent the methods by which we transform Big Data into actionable knowledge. Essentially, Ayasdi aims to automate the insight discovery process, allowing end users to find valuable intelligence within massive datasets almost instantaneously. Backed by the Defense Advanced… → Read More
Clouds, clouds, everywhere there are clouds. Here’s one more to file in your cloud list from Infochimps that’s all about big data.
Infochimps Enterprise Cloud is the kind of service you won’t see any time soon from an enterprise behemoth like Oracle or most of the enterprise big boys. Why? Because it’s self-service. → Read More
loudera has raised $65M to further fuel Hadoop adoption and expand its European operations. The new round led by Accel Partners, brings the total raised to $140 million. Existing investors Greylock Partners, Ignition Partners, In-Q-Tel and Meritech Capital Partners all participated in the round. → Read More
QuBit, a big-data startup whose analytics platform helps e-commerce sites with customer personalization, is today announcing that it has raised a Series A round of funding — $7.5 million led by Balderton Capital with participation from existing angel investors. As part of the deal, general partner Bernard Liatuad — who founded and sold Business Objects to SAP for $6.8 billion — will join… → Read More
The Open Data Institute, a UK-based incubator and promoter of open-data businesses that was first conceived by Tim Berners-Lee and artificial intelligence pioneer Nigel Shadbolt, is today announcing its first international investment. The Omidyar Network, the investment firm co-founded by eBay’s Pierre Omidyar and his wife Pam, is putting $750,000 towards the ODI. The money comes on top of the… → Read More
Seattle-based enterprise data storage startup Qumulo, which was only founded back in March and has been in a quasi-stealthy state ever since, has raised its voice to announce a $24.5 million Series A financing round today, led by Highland Capital Partners. Madrona Venture Group and Valhalla Partners are also participating in the round — Valhalla having previously contributed seed funding. → Read More
Social analytics firm Socialbakers – the social media monitoring startup that counts Fortune 500 companies like McDonald’s, Nestle, LVMH and Vodafone as clients — has raised $6 million to continue building out its business. The Series B round was led by Index Ventures, and also included participation from existing investor Earlybird Venture Capital. Funding for Czech-based Socialbakers… → Read More
Editor’s note: Barry Eggers is a managing director at Lightspeed Venture Partners where he focuses on information technology infrastructure, with a specific interest in cloud computing, big data, storage, consumerization of IT, and networking.
While the technology that enables big data is quite technical, the direct impact on the average consumer is clear. Baseball, more so than other… → Read More
Talk to an engineer, and the world is full of big data promise. But those who work at the front end the tech industry — business development, sales and marketing people, for example — have largely been cut out of that conversation. That appears slowly to be changing, with the rise of startups that are dedicated to figuring out how to harness big data in a way that is digestible to those who… → Read More
Lucky Sort, the Portland-based visualization engine for making sense out of live data streams, is announcing its first partner: StockTwits, a social network for traders that lets users share stock-related information in real-time. Additionally, Howard Lindzon, StockTwits CEO and co-founder, has now also invested in Lucky Sort alongside a couple of other angels, who, combined, have added an extra… → Read More
InfoArmy, only four months into its life as the operator of a crowdsourced competitive intelligence platform, is announcing a significant injection of capital as it continues to build out its business. The company has raised a $17.3 million Series B led by Norwest VenturePartners, with Trinity Ventures also participating. The total raised by InfoArmy to date is now $19.3 million. (The… → Read More
Big data will drive $232 billion in spending through 2016. It will directly or indirectly drive $96 billion of worldwide IT spending in 2012, and is forecast to drive $120 billion of IT spending in 2013. → Read More
Big data is one of the more fascinating developments in today’s tech world: harnessing the huge wave of information that comes out of our many Internet-based networks and then trying to make sense of it. And while some of the companies in the space have come in the form of startups, the newest player is not a small VC-backed effort but one much bigger: the multinational carrier Telefónica. Today… → Read More
Alteryx has opened a big data-analytics apps studio for people who do not necessarily have a deep knowledge of data science. The service is available as part of Alteryx 8.0, the analytics provider’s latest release. The intent is to make data analytics as accessible as a consumer application makes its service. → Read More
RainStor, makers of a “NewSQL” database, announced that has received a $12 million series C round led by Credit Suisse And Rogers Venture Partners with participation by previous investors Doughty Hanson Technology Ventures, Storm Ventures and The Dow Chemical Company. The company has now raised at least $23.5 million. → Read More
Today Trifacta, a company building a cross-platform interface for dealing with big data, announced that it received a $4.3 million investment from the Accel Partners Big Data Fund. The company also raised money from X/Seed Capital, Data Collective LLC, Dave Goldberg, Venky Harinarayan and Anand Rajaraman.
Trifacta is a team of computer scientists with deep experience in data visualization… → Read More
Today cloud-hosted database provider Cloudant announced it has received both a custom development agreement and an undisclosed investment from In-Q-Tel, an independent non-profit venture capital firm funded by the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies. The announcement follows In-Q-Tel’s investment in MongoDB makers 10gen last month. In-Q-Tel investments are rumored to typically range from $1… → Read More
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